Hart on theodicy and tsunami

Paul J. Griffiths reviews David B. Hart’s new book The Doors of the Sea: Where Was God in the Tsunami? (link via Mere Comments)

From a Christian point of view, Mr. Hart notes, such events are quite easy to explain, if difficult to accept. They are dramatic instances of the fact that the world is profoundly out of joint, damaged in deep ways by the fall of Adam and Eve and the rebellion of man. This fall, brought about by the exercise of human freedom, has altered the very physical order of the cosmos so that what God had intended to be a world of harmony and peace, free from suffering and death, is now a world running red with blood.

Much of this blood is shed by human ingenuity, in holocausts and genocides and gulags. But much of it is shed by earthquakes and storms and tidal waves and plagues, catastrophes independent of human will. This was the case for the quarter-million people who died in December but of course it is the case as well every time, for instance, a stray pathogen robs a single child of life.

Indeed, such tragedies are common. For Christians, they are horrors, evils opposed in every way to God’s loving intentions. (Mr. Hart notes, by the way, that the post-tsunami skeptics, in their what-kind-of-God question, posited a Christian and loving god and not a version of the cruel or indifferent gods that are a part of some other religious traditions.) More important, God can achieve victory over such tragedies and in fact has already begun to do so in the victory over death won by Jesus on the cross. There will be a time, too, when comfort is provided to those who have suffered and died, when the world will be irrevocably returned to the harmony intended for it.

But until then the only fully Christian response to events like the tsunami, argues Mr. Hart, is mourning and lament. The effects that natural disasters have on us are privations, absences, negative images of what God’s love intends for us and for the world. There is nothing good to say about them because, precisely, there is nothing good in them. By arguing in such a way, Mr. Hart draws upon and restates, with verve and ornament, the classical Christian view that all evil is an absence, a privation of good.

Thus to the claim that the tsunami provides evidence against the existence of a benevolent and omnipotent God Mr. Hart responds: The disordered world in which we live isn’t as God intended and created it. God did order the world in such a way that natural disasters don’t happen. The only disaster he permitted was the one that we ourselves succeeded in bringing about, the one that disordered the world in the direction of chaos. God will finally overcome even this, Christian faith teaches. But until that victory is complete the damage wrought by chaos provides no evidence against God. Or, as Mr. Hart likes to put it: The God against whom natural disasters might provide evidence isn’t the one in whom Christians believe.

Despite its difficulties, the doctrine of original sin seems to be the perennial way of reconciling the existence of a benevolent God with the manifest disorder of the world. Also see Hart’s article from March’s First Things.